HAZELWOOD — Damian Jackson has been reading a lot lately about the school-to-prison pipeline. He feels like his son is in the early stages of being forced into it.
Jackson’s 6-year-old son is a first grader at Townsend Elementary School in the Hazelwood School District. Earlier this year, he was given a 30-day, out-of-school suspension. There was an altercation in the classroom between some boys. The teacher broke it up. She came out of it with a bloody nose. Jackson’s son was apparently the culprit.
An immediate two-day suspension was extended to 10 days, and then a month. With Christmas break, the boy ended up being out of school for more than two full months.
Jackson agrees his son needed to be punished. But he’s concerned the district’s policies serve the purpose of writing off his son’s education. To that extent, he’s hired lawyers from the nonprofit to advocate for him.
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“They called him a danger. They considered him like a little criminal in the classroom,†Jackson said. “It feels like we’re at the beginning stages of the school-to-prison pipeline. There wasn’t a lot of care and concern involved. It was very intimidating.â€
Hazelwood spokeswoman Jordyn Elston defended the district’s discipline policies. “Students who violate the behavior code are disciplined in a progressive manner, as outlined in the behavior guide,†she said in an emailed statement.
The school-to-prison pipeline is a real phenomenon. It involves Black children, like Jackson’s son, getting severely punished at a young age, with increasingly harsher punishments and a lack of proper intervention, aggravating problems that lead to the criminal justice system. by UCLA researchers found, for instance, that Black children were suspended from elementary school in Missouri at a higher rate than any state in the country. The attorneys at Legal Services, through their Education Justice Program, have been fighting that problem for years.
Their advocacy has led the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to remind school districts in Missouri that long-term suspensions should be a last resort after counseling and other attempts to improve behavior, and that students on long-term suspensions still have a right to a quality education while at home.
In Jackson’s case, as in the cases of other students Legal Services represents in school districts across the ºüÀêÊÓƵ region, the attorneys believe both provisions of state law have been violated. First, Hazelwood didn’t allow an attorney to be present at Jackson’s initial appeal hearing. Second, the education his son received while on suspension was inadequate and inconsistent.
“We know of several other students in Hazelwood and in other districts who are currently receiving extremely minimal alternative education while long-term removed (from school), and we are concerned that the pandemic has caused a regression in how districts are approaching this right,†says Hopey Fink, an attorney with Legal Services.
In many districts, discipline problems post-pandemic have been on the rise because of the damage the time away from school did to children. And, yet, Fink says, the response in too many cases is to simply recreate the pandemic conditions that led to the problem in the first place.
Over the past couple of years, Fink and her colleagues have successfully convinced the school board of the neighboring Ferguson-Florissant School District, which led the state in long-term suspensions of students, to reform its policies. The goal is to focus on returning kids to schools, with the right tools, and to increase the quality of education offerings for suspended students. The transition has been a struggle.
Earlier this month, several teachers at McCluer High School staged a walkout to protest conditions created by disruptive students, including violence. Some teachers blamed new discipline processes for being overly burdensome.
Fink believes that misses the point. She focuses on the damage that long-term suspensions have on children and ultimately school districts, particularly when students as young as 6 are suspended.
“We all want students and staff to feel safe when they are at school. But a culture of exclusionary discipline does not further this goal. There is no causal evidence proving that zero-tolerance suspension policies make schools safer. In fact, criminalizing and excluding students can lead to long-term mental health problems, confusion, and reinforcement of negative behaviors, especially for very young children who likely do not fully understand that time outside of the classroom is meant to be a punishment,†Fink wrote in an email.
Indeed, that’s Jackson’s concern for his son. The suspension made the boy even more emotional. “The social isolation impacted him. He really did miss being at school.â€
Jackson says when he offered to sit in a class to observe and help with his son, the district declined. He was concerned his son was responding to bullying and would be even less equipped to handle school after being home for so long.
His fears came true. A few days after we spoke, Jackson’s son was suspended for 10 days again, after another physical altercation involving a teacher. Meanwhile, he has to wait until an April school board meeting to go with Fink to appeal the first long-term suspension.
To Jackson and his attorney, the second suspension is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. They believe the two months out of school earlier this year almost guaranteed that the 6-year-old child wouldn’t get the tools and support to be successful at school. Jackson says he wants to do his part to help his son, but he thinks the school can be a better partner.
“My main thing is whenever we are disciplining these kids, we want them to learn from this experience,†Jackson says. “We shouldn’t be basically pushing them out and getting rid of them.â€